Distributed trust topologies are employed in computing environments to enable distributed transaction applications executing on processing nodes in a given computing environment to process (e.g., clear) transactions among entities. Two types of distributed trust topologies are centralized trust topologies and diffuse trust topologies (also referred to as decentralized trust topologies). In a centralized trust topology, transaction processing is distributed but trust management is centralized in a trust authority. The centralized trust authority provisions whitelist information and enforces whitelist compliance to enable the processing nodes in the computing environment to trust each other. Thus, in a centralized trust topology, transaction processing can be performed quickly by checking the whitelists to ensure transactions are being performed by trusted entities. In contrast, in a diffuse trust topology, the processing nodes in the computing environment are assumed to be untrusted and there is no centralized trust authority. Rather, in a diffuse trust topology, trust is achieved through consensus, which typically limits the rate at which transactions can be processed and, thus, results in slower transaction processing throughput than a centralized trust topology. However, centralized trust topologies can be more vulnerable to being compromised than diffuse trust topologies due to the centralized trust topologies having a single potential point-of-failure, namely, the centralized trust authority.
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